I agree to an extent, but running +150G games on a ssd is not viable. Even if you get a top of the line 2T m.2 it would be filled after 10 games of that size. Meanwhile a 12T costs the same and...
I agree to an extent, but running +150G games on a ssd is not viable. Even if you get a top of the line 2T m.2 it would be filled after 10 games of that size. Meanwhile a 12T costs the same and could hold about 90 of those games on it. Needing a ssd isn't the issue, infact I think everyone should have a m.2 for their c: drive, it's the file size for modern games is too high
I might be old but why would I have 10 such games installed at once? I play a game, I finish it (whether that means completing it or not), and usually it's off the machine then. I'm "done". Even...
I might be old but why would I have 10 such games installed at once?
I play a game, I finish it (whether that means completing it or not), and usually it's off the machine then. I'm "done". Even with multiplayer games, there's only a handful I can viably keep around or I won't be able to meaningfully play them any more, anyways. And of my current ones, only FFXIV has a noticable size on the drive.
There are people like me who have a tendency to not finish games right away. I'll bounce between games with some frequency. In addition, there are some GaaS titles, like Hitman. I've finished the...
There are people like me who have a tendency to not finish games right away. I'll bounce between games with some frequency. In addition, there are some GaaS titles, like Hitman. I've finished the entire story, but when sometime new gets released, I'll go back in and check it out. Or replay an old mission just because. I have a few MMOs installed as well. And then there are games my friends and I play, but not regularly. Someone will get an itch to play some game, so we'll all play. I have the storage space, so I'll often keep those games installed just in case.
However, I understand where you're coming from as well. A few times a year, I'll uninstall games I haven't touched in awhile and probably won't touch in awhile. But, I also have fast Internet (Google Fiber), so it's no big deal for me to uninstall today, then download again tomorrow if "needed." I downloaded and installed Guild Wars 2 in like 10min the other day. I think that was between 60-70GB and another of those games a friend wanted to play out of the blue, even though we haven't played in over a year (I've totally forgotten how to play it!). I'll probably uninstall this flavor of the month once we're over it.
But if I had a slower Internet connection, I might be less willing to uninstall things. I have a friend who runs into this issue sometimes. He doesn't have fiber (seems like rest of us do). If there's some game we want to play that's sizable, he/we usually have to wait til the next evening since he has to download the game overnight.
Even if we take this to the extreme, here in Switzerland, a 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 SSD costs 139 CHF, or about 156 USD with the current exchange rates. There are a few cheaper ones, but let's...
Even if we take this to the extreme, here in Switzerland, a 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 SSD costs 139 CHF, or about 156 USD with the current exchange rates. There are a few cheaper ones, but let's assume that we're going for good quality. If we assume the average game to be around 80 gigs (which is definitely on the higher end), that's still 25 games installed. So with the additional cost of the SSD, you're adding another 6 dollars on top of every video game purchase.
Again, this is a very extreme assumption, but if someone really wanted to do it, it wouldn't cost a fortune.
Turning the calculation around, 156$ for 2 TB are roughly 0.08$/GB. So if a game only takes up 17 GB for example, then storing it indefinitely only has a 1.3$ upfront cost, which is very reasonable IMO.
Right, and this will only become more common as everyone's speeds improve. Sure, you can't hold all of your massive games on your SSD, but it's really not a big deal when installing takes 5 whole...
But, I also have fast Internet (Google Fiber), so it's no big deal for me to uninstall today, then download again tomorrow
Right, and this will only become more common as everyone's speeds improve. Sure, you can't hold all of your massive games on your SSD, but it's really not a big deal when installing takes 5 whole minutes. Hopefully adoption of gigabit is quicker than game size expands.
I'd just grab an external or more internal drives. Most games don't and won't need fast enough I/O to genuinely require anything more than a SATA SSD for a long time yet which are reasonably...
I'd just grab an external or more internal drives. Most games don't and won't need fast enough I/O to genuinely require anything more than a SATA SSD for a long time yet which are reasonably cheap, and even beyond that you can always get an HDD and use Steams library feature to move games to/from that storage whenever you feel like playing them or realise you haven't felt like playing them for a while.
I have a desktop so expansion is easy but I have an 1TB M.2 boot drive, a 2TB SATA SSD bulk programs/games drive and a 6TB 7200rpm HDD that the user files along with whatever games aren't being played/don't care about storage speed go on.
Those games are rarely close 150GB however. The types of games that fill an SSD are large AAA games, often open-world. Not the type of games where you jump back and forth between 5-6 of them.
Those games are rarely close 150GB however. The types of games that fill an SSD are large AAA games, often open-world. Not the type of games where you jump back and forth between 5-6 of them.
Arena FPSs aren't because it's basically a dead genre and the games that do get made are mostly indie games with less impressive graphics and lower file sizes, but multiplayer focused FPS games...
Arena FPSs aren't because it's basically a dead genre and the games that do get made are mostly indie games with less impressive graphics and lower file sizes, but multiplayer focused FPS games are some of the ones pushing the install sizes the hardest. Call of Duty has gotten so bad about it that they actually split up the game into multiple components so you can install only what you need if, for example, you want to play multiplayer and don't care about the single player campaign or you've already beaten it. I think they may have even split off some of the individual multiplayer modes in the more recent ones, but I'm less sure about that, I've never been a big CoD guy.
Call of Duty isn't a good example as only MW 2019 was huge at nearly 200GB at one point. The other new CODs are around 70GB in size, which is relatively normal for AAA games nowadays. Also COD has...
Call of Duty isn't a good example as only MW 2019 was huge at nearly 200GB at one point. The other new CODs are around 70GB in size, which is relatively normal for AAA games nowadays.
Also COD has split Campaign, MP, and Zombies for over a decade. I know that MW 2009 had it split but it might have started even earlier than that.
Eh. 70 gigs as standard is still a massive inflation in a fairly short time. That we're now seeing games double that is just the next step in the file size inflation process that's been going on...
Eh. 70 gigs as standard is still a massive inflation in a fairly short time. That we're now seeing games double that is just the next step in the file size inflation process that's been going on since video games have been a thing. I can't remember what the pithy name for it is off hand, but there's an old rule to the effect that file size increases to match the size of the drive. 40 megabytes was a huge hard drive at one point, and games were sized to match. Now 10 terabytes isn't out of the question, and games are sized to match.
It is, but considering the massive leaps in graphics the past few years it's not unexpected in the least. SSDs costs about the same per GB as HDDs did 10-15 years ago, so games being larger really...
It is, but considering the massive leaps in graphics the past few years it's not unexpected in the least.
SSDs costs about the same per GB as HDDs did 10-15 years ago, so games being larger really isn't that big of an issue as people make it out to be (of course there are exceptions, like MW 2019 which was absurd).
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing at all. I was just saying that dumb bro shooters absolutely follow that rule just like everything else does. Edit: And if anything they tend to be on the leading edge of...
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing at all. I was just saying that dumb bro shooters absolutely follow that rule just like everything else does.
Edit: And if anything they tend to be on the leading edge of it. They tend to prioritize graphical fidelity, so even with the relatively small game worlds, file sizes get big fast.
Lots of games are GaaS now-a-days. There's no end at which you delete them. Shitty internet will make you regret deleting that one game you play every few months with your friends, as you're...
Lots of games are GaaS now-a-days. There's no end at which you delete them.
Shitty internet will make you regret deleting that one game you play every few months with your friends, as you're unable to finish the download in less than a day.
I can name you at least Assetto Corsa, BeamNG.Drive, and Cities Skylines as games that I love that don't really have an end. If you're into online gaming, that list gets a lot longer.
I can name you at least Assetto Corsa, BeamNG.Drive, and Cities Skylines as games that I love that don't really have an end. If you're into online gaming, that list gets a lot longer.
because I own them? Not going to ask the retailer to send me a new copy any time I want to play. But then I'm also not the type that plays games the size of chatgpt
why would I have 10 such games installed at once?
because I own them? Not going to ask the retailer to send me a new copy any time I want to play.
But then I'm also not the type that plays games the size of chatgpt
I follow the same sentiment but I have around 60 games installed. Either it's something I'm excited for and I have it day one (something like RE4make or Street Fighter 6), my long term games such...
I follow the same sentiment but I have around 60 games installed. Either it's something I'm excited for and I have it day one (something like RE4make or Street Fighter 6), my long term games such as FFXIV, or my streaming backlog which is full of old RPGs and boomer shooters. Then again I don't have the fastest internet, and depending on the size of the game, it's downloading and installing over night, or over the course of 2-3 days if it's extremely large.
But the moment I complete the games to my own satisfaction, it's off my PC for pretty much forever, except in the case of games I return to because there's something big or new coming to them, ala Cyberpunk 2077 or Dark Souls 3 with the Archthrones mod on the horizon.
You can still have an HDD & move your game files to the HDD until you want them again. It is a little more trouble. I'm disappointed there's no good solutions for using a SSD as a cache for a huge...
You can still have an HDD & move your game files to the HDD until you want them again. It is a little more trouble.
I'm disappointed there's no good solutions for using a SSD as a cache for a huge HDD.
at least on linux, you can do exactly that, either through bcache, or, if you are willing to dive into zfs, through an L2ARC. The first one does caching at a block level, the second one, at a file...
at least on linux, you can do exactly that, either through bcache, or, if you are willing to dive into zfs, through an L2ARC.
The first one does caching at a block level, the second one, at a file level.
I'm sure it exists already but it would be nice to have a streamlined transfer system like Xbox and PS5 do, where you can store SSD-requiring games on an HDD and very quickly and easily swap them...
I'm sure it exists already but it would be nice to have a streamlined transfer system like Xbox and PS5 do, where you can store SSD-requiring games on an HDD and very quickly and easily swap them to the SSD.
The solution is for these games to use Oodle, which is very fast on M.2, and even faster on the PS5 due to Sony and Epic building a specific ASIC for it. I wouldn't be shocked if Epic was trying...
The solution is for these games to use Oodle, which is very fast on M.2, and even faster on the PS5 due to Sony and Epic building a specific ASIC for it. I wouldn't be shocked if Epic was trying to get that ASIC in some SSDs.
There's a lot of them, and there will only be more. I don't play much AAA, but I think Ark: Survival Elvolved is 120GB. Death Stranding was a solid 90GB.
There's a lot of them, and there will only be more. I don't play much AAA, but I think Ark: Survival Elvolved is 120GB. Death Stranding was a solid 90GB.
That's how my 2012 MacBook Pro is still useful. Toss the HDD and throw in an SSD, you immediately take 4 years off its age lol. Just basic web stuff, emulated classic games, light Photoshop work,...
That's how my 2012 MacBook Pro is still useful. Toss the HDD and throw in an SSD, you immediately take 4 years off its age lol. Just basic web stuff, emulated classic games, light Photoshop work, but squeezing more life out of old gadgets is always a good thing in my books.
And if you have issues with wanting lots of games at once, a Steam Cache may be a viable option. But yeah, an M2 is amazing with the instant loads. It's why you get a PS5 over a PS4....
And if you have issues with wanting lots of games at once, a Steam Cache may be a viable option. But yeah, an M2 is amazing with the instant loads. It's why you get a PS5 over a PS4.
I have more of an issue with games being 150GB than games requiring SSDs. I know it's not cost effective business wise, but having a space optimization phase in gamedev would be great.
I have more of an issue with games being 150GB than games requiring SSDs. I know it's not cost effective business wise, but having a space optimization phase in gamedev would be great.
Oh, there IS extensive space optimization in those 150 GB games. You wouldn't believe how much space all the assets take up before they're compressed. Consider just one simple 3d object. Let's say...
Oh, there IS extensive space optimization in those 150 GB games. You wouldn't believe how much space all the assets take up before they're compressed.
Consider just one simple 3d object. Let's say it has 100,000 vertices, 50,000 triangles, and a 4096-by-4096 texture. How much storage does that take up?
Each vertex requires an (x, y, z) position, a normal vector, a (u, v) texture coordinate to map the image to the mesh, maybe a tangent vector... Let's say it requires 10 numbers for a total of 40 bytes. So 4 MB total. (Many meshes in next gen dev have 10x this.)
The texture has a base color map in RGB, but also channels for other surface properties like normal maps, specular, roughness, ambient occlusion, displacement maybe, who knows. Let's just say we have 4 images at 4096 by 4096. That's 16 million pixels times 12 channels equals 192 megapixels or 800 MB raw data. It'd probably compress down to 200 MB.
So one reasonably detailed 3d mesh might be, what now, 204 MB? 0.2 GB?
How many separate 3d objects do you think are in a single scene...?
Trust me. There are heroic efforts going on behind the scenes to squeeze all that content into 150 GB.
Oh, don't get me wrong! Repackers are AMAZING. You're absolutely right. I don't think a lot of studios employ enough talent (or care) to do what the best of them do. I kind of feel like most...
Oh, don't get me wrong! Repackers are AMAZING. You're absolutely right. I don't think a lot of studios employ enough talent (or care) to do what the best of them do.
I kind of feel like most studios really just care about getting from 2,000 GB down to 100 GB and then they shrug at the last bit of optimization because it might increase the complexity of deployment and installs. I don't know. Or maybe the laziness kicks in once the install falls below a certain threshold...
You make a really good point. I'll bet if the developers were billed for bandwidth, the install sizes would start dropping immediately. That reminds me -- remember manual installation in the olden...
You make a really good point. I'll bet if the developers were billed for bandwidth, the install sizes would start dropping immediately.
That reminds me -- remember manual installation in the olden days when drives were measured in megabytes? Almost every game let you do a custom install and choose features...
Size optimization is generally not anywhere near a priority for most game studios unless there is a size limitation. A lot of multi-disc PS2 games had all of the actual gameplay assets across both...
Size optimization is generally not anywhere near a priority for most game studios unless there is a size limitation.
A lot of multi-disc PS2 games had all of the actual gameplay assets across both or all discs, with the only big difference being the movie files and maybe some music.
Oh I don't doubt there's some. But there's no huge incentive to reduce that as much as possible (I'm a dev myself, I know for a fact we don't really care when something takes a bit more space or...
Oh I don't doubt there's some. But there's no huge incentive to reduce that as much as possible (I'm a dev myself, I know for a fact we don't really care when something takes a bit more space or memory because we recommend our users to have powerful PCs), because it doesn't make sense financially: why waste time and money trying to go from 150 to 50GB? We as users will complain, but that's not a deal breaker for buying a game, as long as the size is not ridiculously high (unless you have an 256GB SSD with Windows on it, but then again if you are playing the latest AAA, scrape a few bucks by downgrading your GPU and invest in an SSD).
I remember when I’d software finally fulfilled their promise of releasing a level editor for Rage. The download for it which included the necessary source files for the existing map was larger...
I remember when I’d software finally fulfilled their promise of releasing a level editor for Rage. The download for it which included the necessary source files for the existing map was larger than the entire game by something like two orders of magnitude. And that was just for levels. No movies, no sounds.
I was involved in the warez rip scene in the 90s to early 2000s. Games used whatever space they had available. With floppies if it could fit on 1.44MB, then if the core game was a few hundred KB...
I was involved in the warez rip scene in the 90s to early 2000s. Games used whatever space they had available. With floppies if it could fit on 1.44MB, then if the core game was a few hundred KB they would fill the rest of the space lazily because why not. When CDs became the norm, every game took up 650MB.
For the groups who did the rips it was abundantly clear, the core game could be 50Mb, then they would just chuck in whatever videos and music filling it up. They would ship with wav files even when audio compression was common, same with video.
When DVDs became the norm, would you believe it all the games suddenly needed 4.7GB. Same as before, more space available so you can become more lazy with implementation. Not that this is a bad thing, if it let the developers shave weeks off development by being inefficient, who cares? Still fits on the DVD.
I have a lot of friends who were involved in the demoscene attending Assembly and later Breakpoint. I have a friend who got his job in the game industry from the demoscene. Those people showed you how creative you could be with space. .kkrieger still blows my mind.
Yes if you want to waste huge amounts of bits on textures you can do. But if you were clever about it nobody would notice and might even think it looked better using a tiny fraction of the data.
When 150 GB becomes acceptable, then devs and artists will do exactly as you described. They won't be clever and use mathematics to achieve something tiny and perhaps even better, they will simply think "ahhh, whats another gig right?"
When it was a fixed size liked a DVD fine, if the devs can save themselves weeks of work by filling it up no problem. But when you create such massive games, which in huge parts of the world will either take weeks or be prevented by caps, then you are being lazy at the expense of people who can play.
The devs playing .kkrieger a 96k demo would probably be an eye opening experience. Oh and the relatively recent demo where a guy removed the computer entirely will break them as it did me. I mean, how can you have a demo without a computer? Mad genius bastard.
I was looking at a 30MB collada model in a text editor and got a sense of this, beyond every single vertex having its own entry this model was also rigged to an armature so you have all of that as...
I was looking at a 30MB collada model in a text editor and got a sense of this, beyond every single vertex having its own entry this model was also rigged to an armature so you have all of that as well.
What was astounding to me was how human readable it is though, neat format. Obviously at that level of complexity it isn't exactly readable nor would you ever want to given its size but every single vertex is there, neatly formatted and technically if you knew where to find what you're looking for you could modify the model using a text editor.
I assume these files compress very well too given how they are laid out.
Yeah, I had a similar moment when I first opened up a collada file! From what I know, which is less than many, the cutting-edge trend is for games to store vertex and texture data in a layout that...
Yeah, I had a similar moment when I first opened up a collada file!
From what I know, which is less than many, the cutting-edge trend is for games to store vertex and texture data in a layout that can be decompressed by the GPU, i.e. they can be pushed directly from SSD to GPU without going through the CPU/RAM first. It's a new feature of DirectStorage 1.1. (I haven't used it yet, so forgive me if my understanding is a bit off.)
The big bottleneck today is CPU-GPU communication, so I feel like a lot of recent innovations are trying to reduce the need for transfers.
An issue with Collada is that it does depend on a SAX2 parser which adds processing overhead as well. This is one of many factors that led to glTF and even a binary subset of it.
An issue with Collada is that it does depend on a SAX2 parser which adds processing overhead as well. This is one of many factors that led to glTF and even a binary subset of it.
It would be nice though if it were possible to download the textures in a lower resolution version. Correct me if I'm totally wrong here, but my hardware isn't that powerful and my eyes aren't the...
It would be nice though if it were possible to download the textures in a lower resolution version.
Correct me if I'm totally wrong here, but my hardware isn't that powerful and my eyes aren't the best either (also, I just don't care as much about graphics as I do about story and gameplay), so I could probably go with 2048x2048 instead of 4096px². That would cut texture file size down to a quarter, and since that seems to be the bulk of a game's file size, would use up significantly less storage.
I guess we'll have to see what the future brings us compression-wise. Maybe some algorithm based on neural networks that optimizes game files automatically so development companies don't have to 'waste' time on reducing storage size?
I think the texture optimization will occur faster on the client side than the developer side. The generative AI and Lanczos rescaling done by Nvidia hardware is pretty damn good, it may be easier...
I think the texture optimization will occur faster on the client side than the developer side. The generative AI and Lanczos rescaling done by Nvidia hardware is pretty damn good, it may be easier to just accept 1024x1024 as the norm and let the system do the heavy work.
Only 1 4096x4096 texture? :) More like 3 minimum haha. But yeah 4k textures are an abomination and shouldn't really make it into the released game unless it's the face of the main character for a...
Only 1 4096x4096 texture? :) More like 3 minimum haha.
But yeah 4k textures are an abomination and shouldn't really make it into the released game unless it's the face of the main character for a cinematic.
Particularly when you want an SSD that performs at least as well as an HDD under sustained load. In some cases, HDDs perform better than a "look how cheap this SSD has gotten!" type of SSD....
Particularly when you want an SSD that performs at least as well as an HDD under sustained load.
In some cases, HDDs perform better than a "look how cheap this SSD has gotten!" type of SSD.
At the bottom of the list, the Sandisk SSD Plus/WD Green SSDs are not even performing very badly, with scores between 60 and 70 MB/s. The Patriot P200 and P210 with 512GB and 1TB capacities, the Crucial BX500 480GB and the Kioxia Exceria don't get beyond 40 MB/s, while the BX500 1TB with qlc memory barely manages above 20 MB/s. The P210 512GB only barely managed to beat that, while the 256GB variant did not manage to complete the test, despite multiple attempts.
I wish they had gone into detail of what "did not manage to complete the test" means -- did the disk disappear from the connected drives list? did it hang on a sata command? did you just run out of test time? -- but either way the point is that HDDs have sequential write speeds north of 20MB/s and don't need caching and SLC sections to achieve that.
Depends what size. Last I checked, at 1TB, SSDs cost less, at 2TB they are roughly equal, beyond that HDDs become cheaper. Guess there is just a base cost to having a hunk of metal and magnets.
Depends what size. Last I checked, at 1TB, SSDs cost less, at 2TB they are roughly equal, beyond that HDDs become cheaper. Guess there is just a base cost to having a hunk of metal and magnets.
HDD is still useful for large amounts of long time storage as the cost per tb is lower. Recently had a conversation on discord that SATA SSD is even obsolete and everyone should be on NVME because...
HDD is still useful for large amounts of long time storage as the cost per tb is lower. Recently had a conversation on discord that SATA SSD is even obsolete and everyone should be on NVME because it’s sooo much faster (I’m not sure I agree).
I just watched a video that implied that tape storage is making a comeback (although counter to the video, tape storage never entirely fell out of use as it’s common in backup and archival systems in data centers).
Yes exactly. I have about 32tb of hdd storage in my home built nas. My gaming PC is about 6tb of SSD storage. HDD is still great for videos, photos, files etc. Stuff that doesn't need a load time...
Yes exactly. I have about 32tb of hdd storage in my home built nas. My gaming PC is about 6tb of SSD storage. HDD is still great for videos, photos, files etc. Stuff that doesn't need a load time that has low latency and very fast reading.
This was bound to happen now that consoles have fast SSD, this generation of consoles aren't as weak compared to pc as the last gen ones were. Would love to see direct storage used more in pc games.
This was bound to happen now that consoles have fast SSD, this generation of consoles aren't as weak compared to pc as the last gen ones were. Would love to see direct storage used more in pc games.
From a developer perspective, SSDs offer an unbelievable performance advantage over HDDs. On average, I can read maybe 150 pieces of random data from a hard disk every second; I can read probably...
From a developer perspective, SSDs offer an unbelievable performance advantage over HDDs. On average, I can read maybe 150 pieces of random data from a hard disk every second; I can read probably 100,000 from an SSD. Something like that. You can imagine what that does to load times.
I worked on one project involving full text search across a large corpus where switching from hard disk to solid state offered a 100x performance improvement. Literally from a minute to half a second.
I'm surprised these performance benefits aren't higher up. Yes, SSDs are generally more expensive than a HDD, but the increased bandwidth enables all sort of technical wizardry that would...
I'm surprised these performance benefits aren't higher up. Yes, SSDs are generally more expensive than a HDD, but the increased bandwidth enables all sort of technical wizardry that would otherwise be impossible. I'm particularly thinking of large scale, high quality texture streaming in games. It just wouldn't be possible if we didn't have SSDs.
So I embrace the new minimum standard of SSDs for gaming, as I'm excited to see what cool stuff it enables, when devs aren't forced into supporting the slower HDDs.
I think a better solution for games would be to require an SSD boot drive or cache drive that could be used for data that’s needed quickly (textures, etc) and then the rest could be kept on a...
I think a better solution for games would be to require an SSD boot drive or cache drive that could be used for data that’s needed quickly (textures, etc) and then the rest could be kept on a larger capacity, slower drive. That makes more sense to me, given the massive size of modern AAA games.
I am all SSD except for my home server. But hard drives definitely still have a place.
I ripped all my DVDs and Blu-rays and it amounts to about 25 TB of content (a single 4K Blu-ray is around 70-100 GB). The 200 MB/s speed of SATA III hard drives is more than enough for playing back almost any video file.
It’s just not feasible for me to store all of that on SSDs. I can store all of it on a two hard drives that cost about $500 total. It would be around $1500 for 24 TB of SSDs. For that much money, I can get 3-4x the storage space AND a nice SSD to use as a cache drive.
For large, non-enterprise storage, hard drives are still the most economical option.
I have my home folder on my NAS that uses RAID5 over 7200rpm HDDs. It is quite fast - sequential read speeds (movies) are higher than 1Gbit LAN can get through and having it on RAID5 also helps...
I have my home folder on my NAS that uses RAID5 over 7200rpm HDDs. It is quite fast - sequential read speeds (movies) are higher than 1Gbit LAN can get through and having it on RAID5 also helps with accessing small files. But that is home folder.
For games I use SSD in the PC itself. I bought 500GB Crucial MX500 that has actually system AND games on it. 500GB is plenty enough for me even with games attacking 100GB nowadays. I tend to play one big game at a time and have a few small/indie installed, so 500GB SSD doesn't actually limit me.
And yes - it is SATA SSD as I have i5-3470 CPU. And yes, that is 10 years old CPU in a 10 years old motherboard.
I've got a 1TB SSD that I put all my games on. When it starts to fill up, I use Steam Mover to move games to the larger HDD. If I want to play them again, I either move them back to my SSD or keep...
I've got a 1TB SSD that I put all my games on. When it starts to fill up, I use Steam Mover to move games to the larger HDD. If I want to play them again, I either move them back to my SSD or keep them in the HDD and deal with the longer load times.
Its faster than uninstalling and redownloading everything. And never had an issue with Steam Mover yet.
I just thought about it and realized I haven't bought an HDD since before 2012. I just haven't had any need for them, I know if you're storing a lot of data they still make some sense but that...
I just thought about it and realized I haven't bought an HDD since before 2012.
I just haven't had any need for them, I know if you're storing a lot of data they still make some sense but that hasn't been me (or most desktop/laptop users I'd imagine) for a long time now. 1-2TB is enough for me per computer and of course when that doesn't become enough then 4-8TB in the average laptop is perfectly possible.
Looking back at the prices though... ooft. I remember being quite torn about buying a high end laptop with a 512GB SSD back in 2012 but I took the plunge and never looked back, that drive even still works! it has 5% 'life' left though, apparently.
The hard drive is becoming almost like tape storage in the 90s, obviously different in that an HDD does offer genuine random access but the practical applications seem quite similar: high capacity, cheap, limited everyday use case beyond mass storage.
One caveat to this, which I recently learned the hard way, is that connecting an m.2 drive on certain mobos will disable some or all of the SATA ports. My current mobo has two m.2 slots and four...
One caveat to this, which I recently learned the hard way, is that connecting an m.2 drive on certain mobos will disable some or all of the SATA ports. My current mobo has two m.2 slots and four SATA ports, but each m.2 slot used disables two of the SATA ports (meaning you can either have four SATA drives connected, or one m.2 and two SATAs, or two m.2).
You'll probably want to figure out what main board is installed, all comes down to that. Usually it should be fine, but you might be limited to SATA connections.
You'll probably want to figure out what main board is installed, all comes down to that. Usually it should be fine, but you might be limited to SATA connections.
I highly doubt this, I have an ssd, but i still install games on my hard drive, simply because I've found literally no difference aside from the initial loading time. And i've played a tonne of...
I highly doubt this, I have an ssd, but i still install games on my hard drive, simply because I've found literally no difference aside from the initial loading time.
And i've played a tonne of the newer titles, many of which were open world games: cyberpunk, RDR2, watch dogs legion, etc. No difference.
There hasn't been a new game i've been particularly interested in playing for, what, 3 years now? I'll just hold out until something truly worth it comes along. Even then, HDDs will still be king...
There hasn't been a new game i've been particularly interested in playing for, what, 3 years now? I'll just hold out until something truly worth it comes along. Even then, HDDs will still be king for mass storage/backups for the forseeable future.
I upgraded my main pc to all ssds (for fun, this is my endgame build) and the performance has been great. HDDs still kicking in my server for backups and large/long-term file storage. I think the...
I upgraded my main pc to all ssds (for fun, this is my endgame build) and the performance has been great. HDDs still kicking in my server for backups and large/long-term file storage.
I think the price per gb of SSDs has finally come down to a reasonable price (you can get a 1tb m.2 drive for ~$45) so this is honestly to be expected at this point.
The good news is, SSD prices have been cratering. In the past 6 months, an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO has gone from $650 to $382. I wouldn't use one of these as a boot drive, or any other purpose that...
The good news is, SSD prices have been cratering. In the past 6 months, an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO has gone from $650 to $382.
I wouldn't use one of these as a boot drive, or any other purpose that might involve frequent re-writes. But it would make a great SSD for a Steam library.
SSD is one of the best upgrades you can make to your PC. Greatly improves all performance operations. Cost of doing business.
I agree to an extent, but running +150G games on a ssd is not viable. Even if you get a top of the line 2T m.2 it would be filled after 10 games of that size. Meanwhile a 12T costs the same and could hold about 90 of those games on it. Needing a ssd isn't the issue, infact I think everyone should have a m.2 for their c: drive, it's the file size for modern games is too high
I might be old but why would I have 10 such games installed at once?
I play a game, I finish it (whether that means completing it or not), and usually it's off the machine then. I'm "done". Even with multiplayer games, there's only a handful I can viably keep around or I won't be able to meaningfully play them any more, anyways. And of my current ones, only FFXIV has a noticable size on the drive.
There are people like me who have a tendency to not finish games right away. I'll bounce between games with some frequency. In addition, there are some GaaS titles, like Hitman. I've finished the entire story, but when sometime new gets released, I'll go back in and check it out. Or replay an old mission just because. I have a few MMOs installed as well. And then there are games my friends and I play, but not regularly. Someone will get an itch to play some game, so we'll all play. I have the storage space, so I'll often keep those games installed just in case.
However, I understand where you're coming from as well. A few times a year, I'll uninstall games I haven't touched in awhile and probably won't touch in awhile. But, I also have fast Internet (Google Fiber), so it's no big deal for me to uninstall today, then download again tomorrow if "needed." I downloaded and installed Guild Wars 2 in like 10min the other day. I think that was between 60-70GB and another of those games a friend wanted to play out of the blue, even though we haven't played in over a year (I've totally forgotten how to play it!). I'll probably uninstall this flavor of the month once we're over it.
But if I had a slower Internet connection, I might be less willing to uninstall things. I have a friend who runs into this issue sometimes. He doesn't have fiber (seems like rest of us do). If there's some game we want to play that's sizable, he/we usually have to wait til the next evening since he has to download the game overnight.
Even if we take this to the extreme, here in Switzerland, a 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 SSD costs 139 CHF, or about 156 USD with the current exchange rates. There are a few cheaper ones, but let's assume that we're going for good quality. If we assume the average game to be around 80 gigs (which is definitely on the higher end), that's still 25 games installed. So with the additional cost of the SSD, you're adding another 6 dollars on top of every video game purchase.
Again, this is a very extreme assumption, but if someone really wanted to do it, it wouldn't cost a fortune.
Turning the calculation around, 156$ for 2 TB are roughly 0.08$/GB. So if a game only takes up 17 GB for example, then storing it indefinitely only has a 1.3$ upfront cost, which is very reasonable IMO.
If you really want to you can also use an HDD for cold storage and swap the disk you hold each game on when you’re actively playing it.
Right, and this will only become more common as everyone's speeds improve. Sure, you can't hold all of your massive games on your SSD, but it's really not a big deal when installing takes 5 whole minutes. Hopefully adoption of gigabit is quicker than game size expands.
I'd just grab an external or more internal drives. Most games don't and won't need fast enough I/O to genuinely require anything more than a SATA SSD for a long time yet which are reasonably cheap, and even beyond that you can always get an HDD and use Steams library feature to move games to/from that storage whenever you feel like playing them or realise you haven't felt like playing them for a while.
I have a desktop so expansion is easy but I have an 1TB M.2 boot drive, a 2TB SATA SSD bulk programs/games drive and a 6TB 7200rpm HDD that the user files along with whatever games aren't being played/don't care about storage speed go on.
Some games - arena FPSs, online racing - aren't ever "completed".
Those games are rarely close 150GB however. The types of games that fill an SSD are large AAA games, often open-world. Not the type of games where you jump back and forth between 5-6 of them.
Arena FPSs aren't because it's basically a dead genre and the games that do get made are mostly indie games with less impressive graphics and lower file sizes, but multiplayer focused FPS games are some of the ones pushing the install sizes the hardest. Call of Duty has gotten so bad about it that they actually split up the game into multiple components so you can install only what you need if, for example, you want to play multiplayer and don't care about the single player campaign or you've already beaten it. I think they may have even split off some of the individual multiplayer modes in the more recent ones, but I'm less sure about that, I've never been a big CoD guy.
Call of Duty isn't a good example as only MW 2019 was huge at nearly 200GB at one point. The other new CODs are around 70GB in size, which is relatively normal for AAA games nowadays.
Also COD has split Campaign, MP, and Zombies for over a decade. I know that MW 2009 had it split but it might have started even earlier than that.
Eh. 70 gigs as standard is still a massive inflation in a fairly short time. That we're now seeing games double that is just the next step in the file size inflation process that's been going on since video games have been a thing. I can't remember what the pithy name for it is off hand, but there's an old rule to the effect that file size increases to match the size of the drive. 40 megabytes was a huge hard drive at one point, and games were sized to match. Now 10 terabytes isn't out of the question, and games are sized to match.
It is, but considering the massive leaps in graphics the past few years it's not unexpected in the least.
SSDs costs about the same per GB as HDDs did 10-15 years ago, so games being larger really isn't that big of an issue as people make it out to be (of course there are exceptions, like MW 2019 which was absurd).
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing at all. I was just saying that dumb bro shooters absolutely follow that rule just like everything else does.
Edit: And if anything they tend to be on the leading edge of it. They tend to prioritize graphical fidelity, so even with the relatively small game worlds, file sizes get big fast.
Lots of games are GaaS now-a-days. There's no end at which you delete them.
Shitty internet will make you regret deleting that one game you play every few months with your friends, as you're unable to finish the download in less than a day.
I can name you at least Assetto Corsa, BeamNG.Drive, and Cities Skylines as games that I love that don't really have an end. If you're into online gaming, that list gets a lot longer.
because I own them? Not going to ask the retailer to send me a new copy any time I want to play.
But then I'm also not the type that plays games the size of chatgpt
I follow the same sentiment but I have around 60 games installed. Either it's something I'm excited for and I have it day one (something like RE4make or Street Fighter 6), my long term games such as FFXIV, or my streaming backlog which is full of old RPGs and boomer shooters. Then again I don't have the fastest internet, and depending on the size of the game, it's downloading and installing over night, or over the course of 2-3 days if it's extremely large.
But the moment I complete the games to my own satisfaction, it's off my PC for pretty much forever, except in the case of games I return to because there's something big or new coming to them, ala Cyberpunk 2077 or Dark Souls 3 with the Archthrones mod on the horizon.
You can still have an HDD & move your game files to the HDD until you want them again. It is a little more trouble.
I'm disappointed there's no good solutions for using a SSD as a cache for a huge HDD.
at least on linux, you can do exactly that, either through bcache, or, if you are willing to dive into zfs, through an L2ARC.
The first one does caching at a block level, the second one, at a file level.
I do use L2ARC, but I'm not convinced it's having much performance impact at all. It doesn't help how obtuse the statistics logging seems to be to me.
You can do it directly in steam, right clicking a game has an option to move it to another storage location.
sorry, was refering to using the ssd as a cache.
I'm sure it exists already but it would be nice to have a streamlined transfer system like Xbox and PS5 do, where you can store SSD-requiring games on an HDD and very quickly and easily swap them to the SSD.
It's an existing feature on steam. You do have to manually add drives as storage locations though. After that its super simple to move games around.
The solution is for these games to use Oodle, which is very fast on M.2, and even faster on the PS5 due to Sony and Epic building a specific ASIC for it. I wouldn't be shocked if Epic was trying to get that ASIC in some SSDs.
The downside is Oodle costs money.
why tf is a game 150g??
There's a lot of them, and there will only be more. I don't play much AAA, but I think Ark: Survival Elvolved is 120GB. Death Stranding was a solid 90GB.
As far as I know it's mostly high resolution media: textures, models, videos and images.
That's how my 2012 MacBook Pro is still useful. Toss the HDD and throw in an SSD, you immediately take 4 years off its age lol. Just basic web stuff, emulated classic games, light Photoshop work, but squeezing more life out of old gadgets is always a good thing in my books.
And if you have issues with wanting lots of games at once, a Steam Cache may be a viable option. But yeah, an M2 is amazing with the instant loads. It's why you get a PS5 over a PS4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWltASCJO-U
I have more of an issue with games being 150GB than games requiring SSDs. I know it's not cost effective business wise, but having a space optimization phase in gamedev would be great.
Oh, there IS extensive space optimization in those 150 GB games. You wouldn't believe how much space all the assets take up before they're compressed.
Consider just one simple 3d object. Let's say it has 100,000 vertices, 50,000 triangles, and a 4096-by-4096 texture. How much storage does that take up?
Each vertex requires an (x, y, z) position, a normal vector, a (u, v) texture coordinate to map the image to the mesh, maybe a tangent vector... Let's say it requires 10 numbers for a total of 40 bytes. So 4 MB total. (Many meshes in next gen dev have 10x this.)
The texture has a base color map in RGB, but also channels for other surface properties like normal maps, specular, roughness, ambient occlusion, displacement maybe, who knows. Let's just say we have 4 images at 4096 by 4096. That's 16 million pixels times 12 channels equals 192 megapixels or 800 MB raw data. It'd probably compress down to 200 MB.
So one reasonably detailed 3d mesh might be, what now, 204 MB? 0.2 GB?
How many separate 3d objects do you think are in a single scene...?
Trust me. There are heroic efforts going on behind the scenes to squeeze all that content into 150 GB.
Oh, don't get me wrong! Repackers are AMAZING. You're absolutely right. I don't think a lot of studios employ enough talent (or care) to do what the best of them do.
I kind of feel like most studios really just care about getting from 2,000 GB down to 100 GB and then they shrug at the last bit of optimization because it might increase the complexity of deployment and installs. I don't know. Or maybe the laziness kicks in once the install falls below a certain threshold...
You make a really good point. I'll bet if the developers were billed for bandwidth, the install sizes would start dropping immediately.
That reminds me -- remember manual installation in the olden days when drives were measured in megabytes? Almost every game let you do a custom install and choose features...
Size optimization is generally not anywhere near a priority for most game studios unless there is a size limitation.
A lot of multi-disc PS2 games had all of the actual gameplay assets across both or all discs, with the only big difference being the movie files and maybe some music.
Oh I don't doubt there's some. But there's no huge incentive to reduce that as much as possible (I'm a dev myself, I know for a fact we don't really care when something takes a bit more space or memory because we recommend our users to have powerful PCs), because it doesn't make sense financially: why waste time and money trying to go from 150 to 50GB? We as users will complain, but that's not a deal breaker for buying a game, as long as the size is not ridiculously high (unless you have an 256GB SSD with Windows on it, but then again if you are playing the latest AAA, scrape a few bucks by downgrading your GPU and invest in an SSD).
I remember when I’d software finally fulfilled their promise of releasing a level editor for Rage. The download for it which included the necessary source files for the existing map was larger than the entire game by something like two orders of magnitude. And that was just for levels. No movies, no sounds.
I was involved in the warez rip scene in the 90s to early 2000s. Games used whatever space they had available. With floppies if it could fit on 1.44MB, then if the core game was a few hundred KB they would fill the rest of the space lazily because why not. When CDs became the norm, every game took up 650MB.
For the groups who did the rips it was abundantly clear, the core game could be 50Mb, then they would just chuck in whatever videos and music filling it up. They would ship with wav files even when audio compression was common, same with video.
When DVDs became the norm, would you believe it all the games suddenly needed 4.7GB. Same as before, more space available so you can become more lazy with implementation. Not that this is a bad thing, if it let the developers shave weeks off development by being inefficient, who cares? Still fits on the DVD.
I have a lot of friends who were involved in the demoscene attending Assembly and later Breakpoint. I have a friend who got his job in the game industry from the demoscene. Those people showed you how creative you could be with space. .kkrieger still blows my mind.
Yes if you want to waste huge amounts of bits on textures you can do. But if you were clever about it nobody would notice and might even think it looked better using a tiny fraction of the data.
When 150 GB becomes acceptable, then devs and artists will do exactly as you described. They won't be clever and use mathematics to achieve something tiny and perhaps even better, they will simply think "ahhh, whats another gig right?"
When it was a fixed size liked a DVD fine, if the devs can save themselves weeks of work by filling it up no problem. But when you create such massive games, which in huge parts of the world will either take weeks or be prevented by caps, then you are being lazy at the expense of people who can play.
The devs playing .kkrieger a 96k demo would probably be an eye opening experience. Oh and the relatively recent demo where a guy removed the computer entirely will break them as it did me. I mean, how can you have a demo without a computer? Mad genius bastard.
I was looking at a 30MB collada model in a text editor and got a sense of this, beyond every single vertex having its own entry this model was also rigged to an armature so you have all of that as well.
What was astounding to me was how human readable it is though, neat format. Obviously at that level of complexity it isn't exactly readable nor would you ever want to given its size but every single vertex is there, neatly formatted and technically if you knew where to find what you're looking for you could modify the model using a text editor.
I assume these files compress very well too given how they are laid out.
Yeah, I had a similar moment when I first opened up a collada file!
From what I know, which is less than many, the cutting-edge trend is for games to store vertex and texture data in a layout that can be decompressed by the GPU, i.e. they can be pushed directly from SSD to GPU without going through the CPU/RAM first. It's a new feature of DirectStorage 1.1. (I haven't used it yet, so forgive me if my understanding is a bit off.)
The big bottleneck today is CPU-GPU communication, so I feel like a lot of recent innovations are trying to reduce the need for transfers.
An issue with Collada is that it does depend on a SAX2 parser which adds processing overhead as well. This is one of many factors that led to glTF and even a binary subset of it.
It would be nice though if it were possible to download the textures in a lower resolution version.
Correct me if I'm totally wrong here, but my hardware isn't that powerful and my eyes aren't the best either (also, I just don't care as much about graphics as I do about story and gameplay), so I could probably go with 2048x2048 instead of 4096px². That would cut texture file size down to a quarter, and since that seems to be the bulk of a game's file size, would use up significantly less storage.
I guess we'll have to see what the future brings us compression-wise. Maybe some algorithm based on neural networks that optimizes game files automatically so development companies don't have to 'waste' time on reducing storage size?
I think the texture optimization will occur faster on the client side than the developer side. The generative AI and Lanczos rescaling done by Nvidia hardware is pretty damn good, it may be easier to just accept 1024x1024 as the norm and let the system do the heavy work.
Only 1 4096x4096 texture? :) More like 3 minimum haha.
But yeah 4k textures are an abomination and shouldn't really make it into the released game unless it's the face of the main character for a cinematic.
Been on an SSD since 2015, I couldn't imagine even contemplating a mech drive anymore outside of some storage. I guess this is bound to happen right?
Especially considering just how cheap SSDs have gotten. On the other hand though some game sizes are out of control.
Still not cheaper than HHDs though, so there is a choice to be made
Particularly when you want an SSD that performs at least as well as an HDD under sustained load.
In some cases, HDDs perform better than a "look how cheap this SSD has gotten!" type of SSD.
Translated from Dutch (source at Tweakers.net):
I wish they had gone into detail of what "did not manage to complete the test" means -- did the disk disappear from the connected drives list? did it hang on a sata command? did you just run out of test time? -- but either way the point is that HDDs have sequential write speeds north of 20MB/s and don't need caching and SLC sections to achieve that.
Depends what size. Last I checked, at 1TB, SSDs cost less, at 2TB they are roughly equal, beyond that HDDs become cheaper. Guess there is just a base cost to having a hunk of metal and magnets.
Heck, Im going SSD for my retro roms setup because the reliability, speed and noise are worlds apart. And thats loading like, 2mb roms!
HDD is still useful for large amounts of long time storage as the cost per tb is lower. Recently had a conversation on discord that SATA SSD is even obsolete and everyone should be on NVME because it’s sooo much faster (I’m not sure I agree).
I just watched a video that implied that tape storage is making a comeback (although counter to the video, tape storage never entirely fell out of use as it’s common in backup and archival systems in data centers).
Yes exactly. I have about 32tb of hdd storage in my home built nas. My gaming PC is about 6tb of SSD storage. HDD is still great for videos, photos, files etc. Stuff that doesn't need a load time that has low latency and very fast reading.
used HDDs with only a few years of use are under $10/TB regularly. Highly recommend everyone builds a NAS.
This was bound to happen now that consoles have fast SSD, this generation of consoles aren't as weak compared to pc as the last gen ones were. Would love to see direct storage used more in pc games.
From a developer perspective, SSDs offer an unbelievable performance advantage over HDDs. On average, I can read maybe 150 pieces of random data from a hard disk every second; I can read probably 100,000 from an SSD. Something like that. You can imagine what that does to load times.
I worked on one project involving full text search across a large corpus where switching from hard disk to solid state offered a 100x performance improvement. Literally from a minute to half a second.
So yeah, I'm surprised the change took this long!
I'm surprised these performance benefits aren't higher up. Yes, SSDs are generally more expensive than a HDD, but the increased bandwidth enables all sort of technical wizardry that would otherwise be impossible. I'm particularly thinking of large scale, high quality texture streaming in games. It just wouldn't be possible if we didn't have SSDs.
So I embrace the new minimum standard of SSDs for gaming, as I'm excited to see what cool stuff it enables, when devs aren't forced into supporting the slower HDDs.
I think a better solution for games would be to require an SSD boot drive or cache drive that could be used for data that’s needed quickly (textures, etc) and then the rest could be kept on a larger capacity, slower drive. That makes more sense to me, given the massive size of modern AAA games.
I am all SSD except for my home server. But hard drives definitely still have a place.
I ripped all my DVDs and Blu-rays and it amounts to about 25 TB of content (a single 4K Blu-ray is around 70-100 GB). The 200 MB/s speed of SATA III hard drives is more than enough for playing back almost any video file.
It’s just not feasible for me to store all of that on SSDs. I can store all of it on a two hard drives that cost about $500 total. It would be around $1500 for 24 TB of SSDs. For that much money, I can get 3-4x the storage space AND a nice SSD to use as a cache drive.
For large, non-enterprise storage, hard drives are still the most economical option.
Yeah, my gf was having issues with Forza stuttering, saw it was installed on her hdd and not the add, moved it over and no more issues.
I have my home folder on my NAS that uses RAID5 over 7200rpm HDDs. It is quite fast - sequential read speeds (movies) are higher than 1Gbit LAN can get through and having it on RAID5 also helps with accessing small files. But that is home folder.
For games I use SSD in the PC itself. I bought 500GB Crucial MX500 that has actually system AND games on it. 500GB is plenty enough for me even with games attacking 100GB nowadays. I tend to play one big game at a time and have a few small/indie installed, so 500GB SSD doesn't actually limit me.
And yes - it is SATA SSD as I have i5-3470 CPU. And yes, that is 10 years old CPU in a 10 years old motherboard.
I've got a 1TB SSD that I put all my games on. When it starts to fill up, I use Steam Mover to move games to the larger HDD. If I want to play them again, I either move them back to my SSD or keep them in the HDD and deal with the longer load times.
Its faster than uninstalling and redownloading everything. And never had an issue with Steam Mover yet.
Steam now natively supports moving games between different locations. Right click the game -> Properties -> Installed Files -> Move Install Folder
I just thought about it and realized I haven't bought an HDD since before 2012.
I just haven't had any need for them, I know if you're storing a lot of data they still make some sense but that hasn't been me (or most desktop/laptop users I'd imagine) for a long time now. 1-2TB is enough for me per computer and of course when that doesn't become enough then 4-8TB in the average laptop is perfectly possible.
Looking back at the prices though... ooft. I remember being quite torn about buying a high end laptop with a 512GB SSD back in 2012 but I took the plunge and never looked back, that drive even still works! it has 5% 'life' left though, apparently.
The hard drive is becoming almost like tape storage in the 90s, obviously different in that an HDD does offer genuine random access but the practical applications seem quite similar: high capacity, cheap, limited everyday use case beyond mass storage.
I'm not proficient with PCs, but is there a way to know if anymore SSD space can be added to the PC? I only have 1 SSD and 1 HDD installed.
Assuming that your PC has additional SATA or m.2 ports, which it very likely does, it's basically just a matter of installing an additional SSD.
One caveat to this, which I recently learned the hard way, is that connecting an m.2 drive on certain mobos will disable some or all of the SATA ports. My current mobo has two m.2 slots and four SATA ports, but each m.2 slot used disables two of the SATA ports (meaning you can either have four SATA drives connected, or one m.2 and two SATAs, or two m.2).
You'll probably want to figure out what main board is installed, all comes down to that. Usually it should be fine, but you might be limited to SATA connections.
I highly doubt this, I have an ssd, but i still install games on my hard drive, simply because I've found literally no difference aside from the initial loading time.
And i've played a tonne of the newer titles, many of which were open world games: cyberpunk, RDR2, watch dogs legion, etc. No difference.
There hasn't been a new game i've been particularly interested in playing for, what, 3 years now? I'll just hold out until something truly worth it comes along. Even then, HDDs will still be king for mass storage/backups for the forseeable future.
I upgraded my main pc to all ssds (for fun, this is my endgame build) and the performance has been great. HDDs still kicking in my server for backups and large/long-term file storage.
I think the price per gb of SSDs has finally come down to a reasonable price (you can get a 1tb m.2 drive for ~$45) so this is honestly to be expected at this point.
The good news is, SSD prices have been cratering. In the past 6 months, an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO has gone from $650 to $382.
I wouldn't use one of these as a boot drive, or any other purpose that might involve frequent re-writes. But it would make a great SSD for a Steam library.